Yesterday, the terribly ineffective U.S. Senate agreed on something, and astonishingly, it was a jobs bill, heretofore a non-starter. However, in a nearly unanimous vote on the “Vow to Hire Heroes” bill they agreed that it just might be good policy – and just plain decent – to offer a tax credit to businesses that hire veterans. Furthermore, the bill contains far more than the tax credit provisions ($5,600/veteran; $9,600/disabled veteran). Here’s how even the tightfisted House GOP Chairmaned Veterans’ Affairs Committee wrote of what this bill would provide:
• Expanding Education & Training: To begin moving veterans out of the unemployment lines, the VOW to Hire Heroes Act of 2011 provides nearly 100,000 unemployed veterans of past eras and wars with up to 1-year of additional Montgomery GI Bill benefits to qualify for jobs in high-demand sectors, from trucking to technology. It also provides disabled veterans who have exhausted their unemployment benefits up to 1-year of additional VA Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment benefits.
• Improving the Transition Assistance Program (TAP): Too many service members don’t participate in TAP and enter civilian life without a basic understanding of how to compete in a tight job market. Therefore, the VOW to Hire Heroes Act will make TAP mandatory for most service members transitioning to civilian status, upgrade career counseling options, and job hunting skills, as well as ensuring the program is tailored to individuals and the 21st Century job market.
• Facilitating Seamless Transition: Getting a civil service job can often take months which often forces a veteran to seek unemployment benefits. To shorten the time to start a federal job after discharge, this bill would allow service members to begin the federal employment process by acquiring veterans preference status prior to separation. This would facilitate a more seamless transition to civil service jobs at VA, or the many other federal agencies that would benefit from hiring our veterans.
• Translating Military Skills and Training: This bill will also require the Department of Labor to take a hard look at how to translate military skills and training to civilian sector jobs, and will work to make it easier to get the licenses and certification our veterans need.
• Veterans Tax Credits: The VOW to Hire Heroes Act provides tax credits for hiring veterans and disabled veterans who are out of work. “
It’s that final “•” set DeMint’s pants on fire.
Even I, a longtime non-supporter of DeMint, was surprised by his vote against this bill, the single vote that stole unanimity from the Senate (of the 95 voting Senators). Here’s what he had to say about the Vow to Hire Heroes bill:
“We’re pandering to different political groups with programs that have proven to be ineffective. All Americans deserve the same opportunity to get hired. I cannot support this tax credit because I do not believe the government should privilege one American over another when it comes to work.”
Yes,
Such a credit has been tried only once before at the U.S. federal level, with the 1977-78
“New Jobs Tax Credit” (NJTC; see Sunley, 1980). The NJTC offered corporations with taxable
income a credit whose value was proportional to the increase in the corporation’s net payroll
employment level above 102% of its previous year’s employment level. Using survey data,
Perloff and Wachter (1979) found that firms which reported knowing about the credit
experienced 3% higher employment growth than other firms. Bishop (1981) also studied the
employment effects of the NJTC and found that it increased employment in the Construction,
Trucking, Wholesale, and Retail sectors in 1977-78 by between 0.66% and 2.95%.
From 1993 t0 2009, 24 states enacted JCTCs
Let’s hope the Senate doesn’t bring up a vote on a bill called “Tax Shelters for Corporate Toilet Seats,” or “More Handouts for Citizens Who Lost More Than 2 Hundred Million Dollars in Fiscal Year 2010.” Mr. DeMint would surely again oppose federal intervention like that as well.
